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Intel i915 Gallium3D Performance Examined

04-22-2013, 11:40 AM

Phoronix: Intel i915 Gallium3D Performance Examined

Last week after a modern Intel Gallium3D driver was proposed for mainline Mesa, a side discussion ended up being ignited about making the i915 Gallium3D driver the default for older generations of Intel graphics hardware. To see where the i915 Gallium3D driver is at compared to the i915 Classic Mesa DRI driver, here are some new benchmarks from aging Intel i945 hardware.

Comment

To be fair, the classic driver has probably had the crap optimized out of it. The performance of the new gallium driver is very respectable considering the limited amount of work that has gone into it and I'm sure if it is made the default that equal performance will be pulled out of it as the classic driver in time.

Comment

To be fair, the classic driver has probably had the crap optimized out of it. The performance of the new gallium driver is very respectable considering the limited amount of work that has gone into it and I'm sure if it is made the default that equal performance will be pulled out of it as the classic driver in time.

Of course, that would actually require that i915g driver makes it as the default driver for older Intel hardware, otherwise there is really little incentive to keep working on it. Userbase can be a very powerful motivational tool.

At least it appears to be usable for running an OpenGL-accelerated, composited desktop which all that flashy effects like wobbly windows fluidly without slowdown or lag. I consider that to be the minimum level of performance acceptable for any driver.

Isn't it common to all atom netbooks except those with PowerVR? e.g. even those with integrated igp on-package, it's still i945 IGP, right?

It's a pity that performance is so bad and even worse with the new driver. In the end, these benchmarks don't really show if normal desktop performance is better or worse, and that is the most important thing for these igps.

Comment

Strange... In my gentoo tests on laptop with exactly the same configuration (old Acer Extensa 5210 with gma950, 2 gigs of RAM and cpu upgraded to T5600) gallium driver is from 10 to 30% faster, than classic.